The life of Assange according to the Spaniards who watched it

Seized by three policemen and shouting, a Julian Assange Disheveled and elderly walked the streets Thursday for the first time in seven years. He forcibly left the building of the Embbady of Ecuador in London, where he had barricaded himself to avoid being arrested.

A scenario that Assange, his team, diplomatic staff and security forces were forced to share in a often tense coexistence within 300 square meters of the embbady floor.

The newspaper El País reported that several cameras recorded their movements in the shelter in which they found themselves trapped. This is the story of his daily builds from the testimonies of a dozen security guards – under the orders of a Spanish company – charged with protecting the legation up to the end. 2017.

The life of a Valencian plumber crosses for the second time with that of Julian Assange in 2016, when he receives a call in which a well-known voice entrusts him with a particular task. He had to travel from the city of Valencia where he lived in London to repair a bathroom fault.

The bottling is in the toilets of the world's most wanted cyber activist, at the Embbady of Ecuador. Four years ago, the former journalist and computer hacker born in Australia in 1971, founder of Wikileaks, the organization that in 2010 had leaked to the media a large volume of documents and hundreds of thousands of internal communications of the United States on the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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A few months before taking refuge at the embbady, ​​Assange had lost an appeal for not being extradited to Sweden, which had filed an international arrest warrant for alleged cases of rape and badual abuse. Once at the Embbady, ​​Ecuador granted him first asylum and then nationality. But as soon as he crosses the door and enters the British soil, he will be arrested. The fear of being watched by Assanges and his entourage at the embbady.

The plumber was called by the private security guards of the diplomatic mission. They needed someone to fix the bathroom and they knew him because he had been working with them for four and a half months as a caretaker a year ago. They feared that, under the pretext of arranging the toilets, the British intelligence services would infiltrate there. The invoice for the four days of repair is as infrequent as the order: around 4,000 euros. Assange could now let the shower water run down again. He did so to prevent any eavesdropping, as they remember what the guards told them, that they hide their name because they engaged with their company to maintain confidentiality .

This episode reveals how a daily incident becomes a complication if it affects the most uncomfortable host in the world, then persecuted not only by the United Kingdom, but also by Sweden. "Guest" is the name with which Assange refers to reports written by security officers; Familiarly, some call it El Juli.

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¿How Spanish militiamen came to work at the Embbady of Ecuador in London? They are employed by UC Global, a private defense and security company registered under the name Undercover Global S. L. in Puerto Real (Cádiz). One of its owners is David Morales, a diver and Marine, who is in charge of protecting the diplomatic legation with the company Blue Cell, whose owner has good relations with the Ecuadorian government that then presided over Rafael Correa.

Morales has signed in its environment ex-military and ex-escorts, but also to less qualified personnel. I offered 2,000 euros per month plus fees. Some work only a few weeks. Other years UC Global worked at the Embbady shortly after the arrival of Assange until 2017, when it lost favor with Ecuador at the time of its arrival. 39, election of Lenin Moreno as President.

"In the embbady, ​​everything was filled with cameras, both inside and out," said Txema Guijarro, currently MP for Podemos and advisor to the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine. Ecuador (the equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), destined to London to help handle diplomatic problem that supposed to have in the Legation the founder of Wikileaks.

"Assange has always had the obsession of being able to hack those images and that, as a result, we were doing counter-intelligence work ourselves for the British," recalls the former advisor. Monitors, a video recorder and standalone power equipment are installed in a filing room. The guards call it "the Batcave", like Batman's underground barracks. The installation allows, according to the person responsible, that the audio-visual signal be seen in real time in Quito.

In fact, the security services are not paid for by the Embbady or the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but by Senain, the National Intelligence Secretariat, according to the Ecuadorian Ambbadador in an internal document sent to a member of his government that he would have had access to the country. Created by Correa in 2009, this body was accused of spying on opposition and was eventually dismantled by its successor, Lenin Moreno. A Guardian newspaper survey estimated the cost of the Assange protection – and surveillance – operation at five million dollars. A Wednesday before his arrest, Wikileaks had denounced to its founder the discovery of what he considered "a huge spying operation", but one of his lawyers, Aitor Martínez, badures that this espionage took place in the time of Lenin. Moreno, at the stage where UC Global no longer provided the service.

Shortly after arriving at the Embbady in 2012, Assange begins to mistrust and asks the diplomatic staff to allow him to work with the recording equipment. He wants to know who's bothering him at dawn in the street, throwing small objects against the windows. Permission is granted, but a few days later, when he uses the equipment in the batcave, the security guard on duty prevents it. They argue and struggle. This is one of the first disagreements.